Where are the newbies?

[Klaus]

Yes, maybe.

But what does "fadden" mean?
Could not find it here https://dict.leo.org/.

[richmond62]

Charlie . . .

Go to LiveCode's website.

[Klaus]

Charlie? LC website?

Cant you give a a noncryptic answer, please?

[richmond62]

My bad: Charlie Faddis.

[stam]

Presumably Richmond is referring to this: https://livecode.com/prototek/
Quite what the relevance is, I'm not sure...

[Klaus]

Aha!?

[SparkOut]

Quite what the relevance is, I'm not sure...

I think Richmond's point is that there are "Charlie Faddis grade" users already paying and committed to the business tier, and that there's little point in chasing more "Charlies" or the "low Livecode-related income/low Livecode-related spend" users such as himself, and instead try to interest many more users from a greater middle ground. I think that's essentially dependent on an apparently more attractive pricing policy.

[stam]

Thanks SparkOut, that was clearer, it's sometimes hard to follow the narrative
But I think we're all in agreement here.

There is not going to be massive uptake by corporations that can spend ££££ on IDEs, they have teams of IT/devs who have cut their teeth on the 'big' languages (C++, C#, Swift, Python, JS, and so on) so pivoting the marketing efforts there is likely to be a high-cost/low-profit venture.

Equally pitching to non-paying users is fine but it won't put food on LC's table.

The most likely niche where LC would find a home would be the medium sized dev house/small dev/hobbyist, and this is the segment that the current pricing structure is most unfriendly to...

There are existing examples of what that pay structure could look like, as I posted above, and providing a concrete, real-life example was exactly the point of my posts...

[Emily-Elizabeth]

Xojo is $399 US for all three desktop platforms (Mac, Windows and Linux)
The same thing for LiveCode is $986.70 US
Guess where I spent my money.

The Xojo trial period also is indefinite, you just can't compile applications but you can use it as long as you want.

[stam]

Xojo is $399 US for all three desktop platforms (Mac, Windows and Linux)
The same thing for LiveCode is $986.70 US

well, u get what you pay for

I'm just kidding of course, you make the point expressed above very well.

I've always felt a good price point would be that of the old 'indy' licence, which is on par with the XOJO licence (but gave u 3 desktop/2 mobile/server) - but that price has increased nearly 400% with the new 'standard' licence if you get the equivalent of what the Indy licence used to include, making it unaffordable for any actual indy developer. Then of course they halve the price at sales and you feel it's bargain only paying 100% more...

But even the old Indy pricing was a big commitment for some, hence the piecemeal approach to payment (like what I linked above) would make it easier for more to actually pay a reasonable/affordable price, since it would probably be preferable to have hobbyists pay *something* rather than nothing, and while there must be some people who have opted for the 'starter' licence, I'm sure its T&Cs have pushed away many prospective customers, in spite being more affordable... and I'm sure has put you off as well...

If you ignore the minor fact that letting your subscript lapse kills all your built apps, Mac + Win with starter pack could be as little as $240 - well, ok, if you get 2 platforms with 1 subscription, that's actually closer to $370 - and this is the other rub: getting 2 separate subscriptions with 1 platform is 30% cheaper than getting 1 subscription with 2 platforms included. Madness!

I can only assume whoever decided these prices were reasonable was having a stroke at the time...

The Xojo trial period also is indefinite, you just can't compile applications but you can use it as long as you want.

The rub is that XOJO != LC - while you can 'run' apps in the XOJO IDE, it's not the same as the compiled product. But in LC that's exactly what you get so there is much less incentive to every pay anything, which obviously was the reason open source was dropped... sadly.

Many LC users have just always used their in-house apps directly in the IDE without bothering to build anything, so withholding the ability to build has limited consequences - whereas you really can't use XOJO apps that way...

[Simon Knight]

I wonder why RunRev / Livecode went open source in the first place? From memory they started from a payment structure that did not work for them, tried the open source idea for a number of years and then decided it was not working and have ended up today with a similar fee structure to the one that did not work in the past. One might conclude that trying to make a living selling a programming language and IDE is a bit of a non-starter given how many other free or nearly free languages are available.

Who is Livecode aimed at ? People who want a career in programming are probably going to be taught a C, C++, C# possibly Java. Some will continue with these and others will branch into web design using JavaScript or earn money using Visual Basic for Applications(VBA), or whatever its called now. Scientists will probably use MatLab, engineers will want MatLab but be given Excel and a course in VBA (Lockheed Martin I'm thinking of you!). What I am saying is that rightly or wrongly Livecode has been seen a bit of a toy and now its an expensive one littered with odd structures like cards, stacks and behavior buttons.

I don't see where Livecode fits in or who it is targeting.

[richmond62]

I don't see where Livecode fits in or who it is targeting.

I don't think LiveCode have ever quite worked that out themselves.

----------------------

Probably it's time for a 'Fairy Story' from Uncle Richmond.

About 25 years ago there was a very clever schoolboy who was messing around with a programming package called Metacard.

He began to think that the GUI was not really as user-friendly as it might be, so he designed a new, better one.

Then, just as an experiment, he began marketing the front-end for MetaCard; and a lot of people thought it was very clever, and certainly a lot less clunky than the MetaCard front-end.

After a while the boss of MetaCard worked out that Metacard was about to go bottoms up, so he abandoned it, and gave it to the very clever schoolboy.

As the every clever schoolboy, and several of his family members were living off the proceeds of his clever GUI for MetaCard, they renamed things and 'glued' the GUI to MetaCard and gave it a new name.

And, rather like a snowball rolling down a hill, for quite a long time it got bigger and bigger.

By the time the 'snowball' had reached either the bottom of the hill, or at least, a more gentle slow where it might continue rolling, but not really increasing in size much, the very clever schoolboy, now employing some of his family members, and quite a few other clever people, was 'hooked' and also began to realise that things were not quite as simple as they had previously been.

One of the problems was that the very clever schoolboy, while being very clever in terms of computer programming, did not know quite so much about economics or marketing, so he either hired people to do that job for him, or he tried to do those things himself.

The very clever schoolboy made several financial experiments over the ensuing 20-odd years: none of which really gave him what he wanted: quite a large income both for him and his associates to live on, and to continue developing what was now not just a 'GUI glued onto something else' but a unified, complex system for programming.

Several of the very clever schoolboy's marketing experiments, and his way of explaining to donors and paying customers why he is changing tack, really only served to make a lot of users of his wonderful package extremely disgruntled, and did not really serve to bring in more people who would pay him and his company to allow him what he wanted to do.

There is every possibility that while all this has been going on, however wonderful the programming package might be, that the whole offering has been either superseded, or at least pushed aside by other forces.

The Betamax system of making video-recordings was better than the VHS system: yet, owing to many factors (arguably better marketing) the VHS system took over the market completely.

---------------

Now it is quite possible that Uncle Richmond is talking out of his bottom . . .

But had someone at LiveCode worked out, properly, where LiveCode fitted in or who it was targeting, and done some proper targeting instead of playing around with horribly inconsistent marketing strategies, "things" might have been different.

There is a school of thought that quite a few people, including Uncle Richmond, have been telling LiveCode for years about where LiveCode SHOULD fit in, and what sort of niche it SHOULD be targeting, but LiveCode have NOT really listened.

[stam]

One missing detail and perhaps the answer as to why open source came about is the massively successful kickstarter, perhaps one of the most successful ones, amassing quite a large sum of money. While this did provide the community versions(s), I believe several stretch goals were eventually abandoned.
While this did arguably help spread the word, ultimately - judging by current events - this was not sustainable.

The model, IIRC, was to provide a completely free 'community' version, a 'community plus' version for £80/year or some such - this I think offered a low level of autocomplete; then there was the Indy version that offered fuller autocomplete and the 'Pro' version that was too expensive to even consider but had all the bells and whistles. But all versions (community, community+, Indy, Pro) effectively were the full product and could build apps (the main difference really was the honour system of declaring your app as built with community versions and therefore having to adhere to GPL3).

But anyone can see that the incentive to upgrade to the Indy version (or 'Pro' version, which was priced on par with the current full standard plan) would have been very weak at best and the longer term outcome was predictable.

On top of this, it's always been a difficult sell to programmers from other environments: the vast majority share common characteristics and therefore cross learning is usually a simpler process and the 'big' languages pretty much much have all adapted the object oriented programming paradigm (classes, inheritance, polymorphism, encapsulation etc), which makes learning x-talk conceptually difficult and one has to really persist with it to 'grok' it.

The trick is to get these tentative explorers to invest while exploring (LC needs a steady income stream) and if committing offer an incentive to invest, which means a reasonable price. The starter plan as it stands right now is wrong on a couple of levels and discouraging new users to consider this. A pro developer wanting all the features would have to shell out £2K/year for the privilege - so where is the incentive?

[richmond62]

the massively successful kickstarter

Indeed.

But a something that is kick-started needs continued 'kicking' to maintain it, and that, I believe, is where the calculations went quite badly wrong.

The 'continued kicking' (if it had been thought about) was, presumably, meant to keep coming from the same source as the money raised in the kickstarter, and not from the commercial variant.

It is well-known that LibreOffice and so on subsist on donations: but LibreOffice has a 'reach' that LC can only dream of.

Ubuntu is financed by Canonical, a commercial company that provides 'ancillary' services connected to Ubuntu. I have no idea what the installed base of Ubuntu and its variants (Kubuntu, Xubuntu, and so on) is, and what proportion of that pay for Canonical's services, but I am sure it is vast compared with LC.

The failure to deliver the stretch goals of the kickstarter probably did not do much to encourage people to continue donating: in fact, with the wisdom of hindsight, it might have been more clever not to promise any stretch goals at all.

While the release of the Open Source variant of LC was a triumph, LiveCode singularly failed to keep up the pressure and the 'razzamatazz' surrounding that.

[Simon Knight]

Probably it's time for a 'Fairy Story' from Uncle Richmond.

Snag is most Fairy Stories end with a handsome Prince riding in on his charger and saving the day. That must be the next chapter......